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Who We Are and Where Our Place Is

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Who We Are and Where Our Place Is www.strategyandfuture.org Now You know Who We Are and Where Our Place Is 10 / 2019 – Jacek Bartosiak The Baltic Sea "turns" near the mouths of the Vistula and the Niemen to the north at the very length in which the Black Sea as the most distant outlet of the Mediterranean Sea extends far to the north. The Baltic-Black Sea Bridge (aka Intermarium) is located here. Our place in the world. Eastern Europe from space (photo: Wikipedia) Considered by our ancestors as the most important of the geopolitical zones on the continent when it comes to influencing the balance of power in Europe, it is a separate geopolitical construct with state- forming organisational capacity. It resembles a wide "transition strip" between Western Europe and Eastern Europe and it can be seen that it is connected with the plain terrain of the huge continent of Who We Are and Where Our Place Is Author: Jacek Bartosiak – 10/2019 1 www.strategyandfuture.org Now You know Eurasia. Meanwhile, located west and extended towards the World Ocean, the western part of Europe has been under the influence and the breath of the sea throughout its history. From the sea came the influences of the people of the Sea: the Goths of the northern seas, the Angles and the Saxons, the Arabs and the Vikings, the English and the Spaniards, and in the 20th century even the Americans left their mark on Western Europe. Europeans created world empires from the base in the Western Europe by accessing the World Ocean. The sea decisively influenced the economic development of maritime Europe. However, the part of Europe located closer towards Asia, starting from the eastern part of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium region already has a continental character. The impact of the sea has already been clearly reduced here. Everything that happens here is heavily weighted, in this huge and overwhelming continental landmass from the east. And only the Black Sea divides this huge block of land hanging from the east as if separating it into two segments. From there, invasions with a clear continental character came from to Europe. It is continental spaces that have determined the directions of political and economic development of the region and, to a large extent, its status and political anchoring. It is continental Europe, although it is still between-the-seas - hence the concept of the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium, creating a peculiar spatial block with its three frontiers opening to the Asian continent, even if along the way you would have to cross some outlets of the marginal seas around Europe. Both European geopolitical orientations - sea and continental meet on the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium. The transitional location of this place between Europe proper and the great spaces of Eurasia did mean that both Western European political forces heading east, as well as the political forces of imperial Russia - unfaltering for several centuries - aimed at subordinating or destroying all political organisms throughout the entire Intermarium. Above all, they tried to prevent the creation of a unified political-state organism covering the geographical whole of the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge, covering, after all, a huge area of about 1 million square kilometers. Between the mouth of the Oder, the Vistula and the Daugava River to the Baltic Sea, then along the Dźwina River up to the Smolensk Gate, then from the Smolensk Gate to the mighty Dnieper down its course towards the Black Sea, then its estuary in the Black Sea and the seashore to the mouth of the Dniester and the Danube, ending with the great Carpathian chain, interrupted momentarily by the Moravian Gate and then further along the Sudetes to the Oder valley flowing to the Baltic and closing this area just described. Who We Are and Where Our Place Is Author: Jacek Bartosiak – 10/2019 2 www.strategyandfuture.org Now You know A different geological location, a different geographical layout, a different outline of shoreline shapes and surface shapes, different road systems and water communication distinguished the political history of Western Europe - this bizarre mosaic of nationalities, cultures, religions, political tendencies, social temperaments from the history of eastern Europe - cut off from the oceans and the great routes of economic and social ideas of the world. It is very characteristic that the river systems in Western Europe are more or less symmetrical, and the main river has left and right river basins of approximately the same size. Such is the Rhine, the Seine and other rivers of the west of the continent. However, starting to the Oder to the east, this symmetry clearly ceases. There are many more right tributaries and they are much longer than the left ones. Such are the Vistula, the Niemen and the Dźwina basins beyond the Oder. Another thing which is very characteristic, further to the east of the continent, the above feature ceases and the basins of the Russian rivers are again symmetrical, a perfect example being the Volga. In addition, the river basins on the Baltic-Black Sea Bridge are distinguished by the fact that the peak areas of the river basin of larger tributaries approach very close to the main river of the neighboring river basin. The water divisions are usually very low, narrow and easy to cross. This means that the Intermarium rivers are an excellent communication network, they can be easily connected by canals with very short relocations. Hence, hydrographic cohesion is the second feature after convenient connectivity east-west and north-south and this is where the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth existed. Rivers in former times were a great means of communication, and in the Middle Ages in Poland the water level was even several meters higher than today. The valleys they conditioned also naturally gave directions to land routes. People have always moved and marked roads along river and stream valleys. This is also the case today. So the historical significance of the river network was, especially in the Intermarium, enormous. This can be explained in large part by the natural expansion of the Polish people to the east. In the geopolitical "long duration" lens - tributaries of the Oder, then the Vistula, the Niemen, the Bug and even the Dnieper extended to the east resembled the arms with which the former Polish empire reached east. The region's most important communication land gate is the Moravian Gate, located in the western part of Poland and constituting a smooth communication link with the west and south of the continent. Passing through the Carpathian Mountains, however, the Gate also indicated an almost inaccessible road through the rocky wastes of the Kars leading quite laboriously to the Adriatic. Therefore, the Moravian Gate as a link between the southern and northern seas in Roman times could not compete with more convenient roads leading through the Alps in the same direction. The Brenner Who We Are and Where Our Place Is Author: Jacek Bartosiak – 10/2019 3 www.strategyandfuture.org Now You know Pass was an especially strong competitor to the Moravian Gate and the natural communication advantage of the Brenner Pass probably decided that the Adriatic Basin would become an area of German political expansion, and not former Polish dynasty of the Jagiellonians. These weaknesses of the Moravian Gate, along with the nature of the Vistula's water network and other major rivers of the Intermarium (stronger right tributaries) contributed to the fact that the entire history of Poland was branded with expansion to the east. It is this Intermarium - stretched out across the land and not cut through with mountain chains, intertwined with a dense network of natural valley roads, because it is the most important stigma, and also the physical condition for the existence and political development of the Old State. Thus, giving Poland a central and pivotal location in the Intermarium, like a crossroad on a communication node – right on the line on which the Baltic Sea (our ancestors also called it Sarmatian) and the Black Sea (called Southern or Roman) turn together, although independently of each other - towards the north. Who We Are and Where Our Place Is Author: Jacek Bartosiak – 10/2019 4 www.strategyandfuture.org Now You know In the history of the last thousand years, the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium was a great bastion and at the same time a great military training ground for the powers of the European continent and a huge historical "exercise ground" through which war campaigns’ trails ran from west to east and from east to west. Not a single war for domination on the continent in modern times, shaking the history of Europe, was spared to the Intermarium. Mongol power and Tatar-Turkish expansion invaded it. Right in the Intermarium fights took place between Western and Eastern Europe, the routes of Napoleon, the Swedes, the Russians, the Germans and the Soviets led through it. The front of World War I stopped on it. Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and Napoleon's strike against Moscow in 1812 emerged from the narrowest place of the Intermarium between the Carpathians and the Baltic. Russia's expansion and the political influence of Western Europe stopped there. The pressure on the Intermarium spontaneity continued from the very beginning of the formation of the geopolitical map of Europe, separated from the debris of the ancient world in the 8th century. Strong eastward pressure, geopolitical expansion, and demographic expansion followed, which led to the creation of several German states in colonized areas. Over time, two of them began to play a key role: Prussia and Austria. In the 13th and 14th centuries, a Mongolian assault came to the Bridge, which had previously engulfed China - on the other side of the Eurasian land masses, and devastated the formerly powerful Kievan Rus, simultaneously devastating the vast area from Lower Silesia to the Adriatic and Bulgaria.
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